


Oh Come Let Us Adore Them

by Zoya1416



Category: Rivers of London
Genre: Christmas Presents, Embarrassing Christmas presents, Gen, NSFW links, Time period: after Hanging Tree but no specific spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-01
Updated: 2018-09-01
Packaged: 2019-07-04 21:53:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,618
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15850110
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zoya1416/pseuds/Zoya1416
Summary: Beverley Brook and Sahra Guleed want to give some nice, friendly Christmas presents to Peter, Nightingale and Dr. Walid. As you do.





	Oh Come Let Us Adore Them

**Author's Note:**

> The related links at the bottom are NSFW.
> 
> Thank yous to my betas, ana and sukiyaki531!

Nightingale, Dr. Walid, and I met Sahra and Bev at a sports pub a bit farther away from the one we usually went to. I wasn’t sure why Bev had picked it. Certainly it wasn’t any higher class. The entrance had a plastic trio of carolers bleating Jingle Bell Rock, which set the tone for the interior. 

The pub owners had been exuberant in the seasonal decorations. Fairy lights lined every window, twinkling, and draped over lights in artistic loops. The tables all had sprigs of holly in vases, and evergreen branches surrounded doorways. You couldn’t see the ceiling through the dangling balls and loops of tinsel, and the tree was large enough they’d had remove an entire table. It was big with full branches, and I hoped Nightingale wouldn’t try to make me identify it. 

He didn’t but mainly because he was more excited about it than I expected—he smiled and went over to stare at it in detail. Dr. Walid followed him over. 

“This is more like the way trees were decorated when I was small,” Nightingale said, turning back to the rest of us. It had sculpted crystal and glass ornaments, and (fortunately unlit) candles. There were bright paper chains, strings of what turned out to be plastic popcorn (no temptation for mice and rats), and streams of ribbons. Loops of beads curled around the tree as well. To please 21st century customers, it was also well swaddled in fairy lights.

Beverley had snagged a back table for us, I hope using only her natural charms. I had mostly given up worrying about her glamouring. It seemed to be completely unconscious, and as far as I knew only extended to getting drinks and similar minor things. I remembered the first time I’d met Ty, when she’d reached out to me from several streets away. She’d tried to make me drink water from her fountain, and the results had been educational for both of us. 

I’d gone for our first round of drinks, telling Beverley so she wouldn’t start on the waitstaff. She nodded and turned to Sahra. They started whispering and, I thought, even giggling, while they glanced over at me. Never a good sign. 

Nightingale and Dr. Walid came over and sat down; Dr. Walid frowned at Sahra as her first drink proved to be an eggnog. She rolled her eyes and held it up for him to sniff. 

“No spirits, mostly cream and nutmeg,” she explained to us. “This has the best virgin eggnogs in London.” Well, one reason to be here.

Beverley had a cosmopolitan, while Nightingale and I stuck to our usual pints. Dr. Walid had only a bottle of water, and an order of chips. The rest of us shared a large pizza.

“Did the Christmas tree look like the ones you had in Scotland?” I asked him.

He shook his head and kept eating his chips. 

“Scotland wasn’t big on Christmas. The Presbyterians, you know.”

I didn’t know, but Bev did. She’d once taken a comparative religion class—I wondered whether her mother had made her learn about competing deities.

“They hated Christmas. Or celebrations at Christmas, anyway, because it wasn’t holy. Even made their wives come out and spin and their serfs”—Dr. Walid frowned again—“anyway, their people had to plow on Christmas. Right lot of grizzlers, you ask me.”

“Hogmany was the big celebration,” Walid said. He’d finished his chips and nearly all his bottle of water. “It’s New Year’s Eve—all night.” He grinned at us, not as tired now. “You two,” nodding at me and Nightingale, “would be very popular for first-footing. It’s an important custom for luck—whoever is the first to cross your threshold after midnight sets the luck for the year. Tall dark-haired men bring the best luck.”

I smiled a little. "I'm probably not the kind they're thinking of." I had never been to Scotland and knew fuck-all about it, but it was probably about as biased as the rest of the hinterlands of Britain. I had no desire to travel there.

He shrugged. “No one wanted short gingers to be first, either,” which was missing the point entirely, but then he went on to describe how being given coal was actually a good thing. “And used to be salt. Shortbread and black bun too.”

He went on to describe black bun which sounded like another type of the hellish fruitcakes Brits try to pretend they like. I wasn’t sure why I was so grouchy now. I hadn’t been when I came—Bev and I had cooled off a little, not because of Ty’s warning about me dating an immortal goddess, but—just because. Even though I knew I loved her, I was still distracted at times. She said I was inattentive. We were not quite arguing. And Sahra was more and more our third Folly officer, right useful. So why did I feel nervous about her smirk?

I knew I’d been right to be suspicious when Bev finished her pint and then pulled up a brightly coloured shopping bag. 

“These are for you. Merry early Christmas.”

“You didn’t have to”—Nightingale looked alarmed. Beverley and Sahra were not on his Christmas list, and I could see him starting to worry how to reciprocate.

Sahra bent over, her hijab bobbing down, like that was going to keep the rest of us from seeing her snickering. Bev ignored her and handed a bright green package to Walid. She tried to be polite but I could see she was hiding a laugh.

He smiled a little, as unsure as Nightingale about this unusual generosity from a River. 

I looked directly at Bev and narrowed my eyes. “There had better be no fucking obligations with these.” 

“None at all,” she agreed.

“Och!” exclaimed Walid, the first time I’d heard him say that. He had pulled out a garment from the box—a T shirt—and was looking stunned.

He tried to hide it from us, and actually blushed. Nightingale was next to him and saw it, though, and he pressed his hand over his mouth.

Seeing no hope, Walid opened it out for us all. The photo-shopping was good.

There was what appeared to be an actual photo of Walid, leaning back against his pathology table (empty, fortunately) with a little grin. Jennifer Vaughn must have taken this, the traitor. I was fairly sure that he wasn’t actually that ripped, though, because although he was wearing his usual lab coat, he’d somehow forgotten to put on a shirt.

There was a caption, because of course there was.

“Pathologists do it wide open!”

“What did Dr. Walid ever do to you!” I wasn’t yelling at Bev, yet.

She ignored me and handed me a red box. I took a quick peek.

“No. No, no, no, this is wrong.”

Again, superlative photoshopping. Two images of myself looked out at me, both men bare, except one was holding a top hat, and the other the traditional lagomorph to provide a decency of coverage. 

Walid seemed to have recovered enough from his embarrassment to look over at what I was holding and start laughing. I was going to kill Bev and Sahra, I really was.

“Magicians do it like rabbits!”

Nightingale had also seen my shirt and was now staring grimly at the two women.

“Beverley, Sahra”—and Bev handed him the third box, gold wrapping twinkling as bright as the tree ornaments.

He stared at her very hard. But I guess in a life of 113 plus years, he must have had a few embarrassing Christmas moments, and although he sighed, he tore off the paper. He went completely pale, then red.

I looked at his shirt and gasped. No wonder he was reacting that strongly. I recognized the basics. It was his own face of course, turned halfway to the camera, with the little grin I knew he mainly kept for Molly. She must have taken the picture. Hell, she might have started the whole thing, who knew what she got up to on the computer now.

The figure from the neck down was the Matthew Lewis photoshoot with a loose green cardigan, leaning back with his legs spread open—in tight white pants and nothing else. The infamous picture of he-who-used-to-be-Neville Longbottom, from the Attitude photospread. With “The Bulge!” as referred to in any number of so-called articles, prominently displayed. It was worse than the original, because his curled left hand now held the perhaps inevitable length of literal wood.

“WIZARDS DO IT WITH A STAFF!!!”

He crumpled it in his hand, obviously not taking it as well as the other two of us had. Well, it was much worse. The staff had been posed at the most embarrassing possible angle. I could only think that the girls—and Molly! had decided to rip away at his dignity while they’d been drunk. Well, Sahra wouldn’t have been drunk, so I didn’t know what her excuse was. Some infernal motivation. And it really was wounding him, I could tell. He’d never treated them with anything but respect and kindness, not only the goddess, but also the copper who’d been placed as a liaison with us mostly against her will. It wasn't objectively that bad a photo-mine showed more skin, but I'd had episodes of public nudity, chasing a suspect when I was wearing only a hospital gown, and the time Bev made me walk along that river bank. But for a man who was normally not seen in less than three layers...

The shirt smoldered away in his hand, and in seconds was nothing but ashes. I was impressed. It must have been an actual fireball, but it hadn’t burned him at all, I could tell. When the last ashes had fluttered down, he took a relieved breath.

At last his lips quirked, he looked directly at the guilty pair, holding up the 2nd and 3rd fingers of his right hand, like a V for Victory sign. Sahra and Bev relaxed. They’d got pretty worried as he burned the shirt. Then he smiled evilly—I’d never seen that exact expression on him—and forked his fingers down. I could feel a breeze rush past me.

There were shocked gasps on the other side of the table as he held the spell for 3 seconds. Bev’s and Sahra’s blouses had dropped open enough to reveal cleavage—well, more cleavage for Bev, but for Sahra possibly the first she’d ever shown. I gaped at them, then quickly turned my eyes away.

Seconds later their clothing reassembled itself, which was another amazing spell. Then I realized what was brilliant. He’d only painted an illusion of opening breasts over them—almost like a hologram, really—without disturbing actual cloth at all. 

With a smug expression, still keeping his eyes on them, he reached over and snagged both Walid’s and my shirts before we knew what he was about. 

“Wait!” I shouted, as he began to ball them up. I grabbed mine back. It was in poor taste, yes, but if Bev was happy to see me like that—we could be making up soon. She quirked her lips. I might have played that exactly right. 

Sahra, unrepentant now she was modest again, pleaded insincerely with Walid. “You’re not even going to show it to Jennifer? She didn’t get to see how it turned out.”

Walid struggled mentally, I could tell. He hadn’t ever married and was quite content with his life alone, and it might be flattering to him to think that the much younger Dr. Vaughn would dare to cooperate with the sneaky plan—

He shook his head. “If I showed it to her, I’d have to report both of us for mutually sexually harassing each other. Burn it, Thomas.”

I could see that Bev and Sahra were a bit glum. Their elaborate joke had mostly failed. I thought fast.

“Say, boss,” I stage-whispered behind my hand to Nightingale. “That was a pretty cool spell. Would it take long to learn it?”

Now the guilty pair looked at me in horror.

“Welllll, “he said, “Not that long.” He let them have another few seconds of dread.

“It’s a 9th order spell, so—only another five years, I reckon. With a lot of practice.”

I couldn’t help but grin. I had felt him cast it, complicated as it was, and that was half the work of learning a spell anyway.

“But I can practice now, right?” I said. “Right?” I held up that V sign again. 

“Oh, of course,” he lied. “But it is a particularly powerful spell. You might even have to—use your staff.”

Dr. Walid snorted, choked, and grabbed his water bottle. Sahra leaned over, making sure he was all right, and peering at him to check that her co-religionist wasn’t too mad at her. He just shook his head, still snorting. 

Nightingale nodded, apparently forgiving them now he’d destroyed the evidence.

“Miss Thames, I believe the next round is yours. Could you get it in person, please?”

She shrugged, rose, and sailed toward the bar, with one tugging glance back at me. I grinned and tipped an imaginary top hat to her, rising to follow her.  
^^^^^^^^^^^  
“What were you guys thinking?” I asked her later when we were sweaty. “How did you ever think Nightingale might be okay with this—?”

“We—it just happened so fast. I saw the picture of the Naked Magicians last weekend—they’re an Australian group, gay allied, doing good work?” Her voice trailed up at the end of her sentence. “Anyway, Jennifer and Sahra and I were out drinking, and—”

“Wait,” I demanded. “Jennifer? Jennifer Vaughn is part of your cabal?”

She shrugged, a beautiful motion lifting her breast as well as her molded shoulder. We were both getting cold, and I dragged a quilt on top of us.  
“Sahra met her, has gone out to coffee a couple of times. Anyyyyway—I texted everybody when I found this picture, and said I was going to get a T-shirt made—Maksim knew a place to get them fast.”

He would, I thought grimly. There seemed to be no end to Maksim’s talents.

“Anyway, Jennifer thought it was funny, said she’d get a picture of Dr. Walid and send it, and Molly thought something might be funny, too—”

“Molly?” I squawked. “You guys corrupted Molly into this?”

Bev turned toward me, dreads sweeping down her face. She was frowning.

“Molly texts all the time. She’s not as much in awe of Nightingale as you think she is, and you know—well she took his picture for us—I thought—that old underwear shot of Matthew Lewis has been a meme lately with other faces—you didn’t see it?”

“I did not.”

“I possibly did not think it through about Nightingale. He hasn’t seemed as—well, ever since Sahra and he and I were trying to steal your food when you were in hospital, and then he let Lady Caroline get away—he just has seemed—more normal. So, anyway, this all happened last weekend, and Maksim got in a rush order. Just picked them up today.”

“Okay, but I’m glad he did that blouse thing.”

She’d crawled on top of me and I could feel her shaking as she laughed. “I didn’t have any idea he could—”

“You deserved it,” I said, as I pulled her down. “Just don’t ever—”

“I still have your picture, you know. Got Maksim to print it—and I could put it up on the wall."

“No.”

“Babes,” she scolded. She kissed me hard, and then we didn’t say anything else for a long time.

**Author's Note:**

> [Dr. Walid](https://goo.gl/images/67ueyU)
> 
> [Peter](https://goo.gl/images/v4oppp)
> 
> [Nightingale](https://goo.gl/images/xu3Ewh)


End file.
